The Frozen Deep

The Frozen Deep was a play, originally staged as an amateur theatrical, written by Wilkie Collins along with the substantial guidance of Charles Dickens. Dickens's hand was so prominent -- adding a proem, altering lines, and attending to most of the props and sets -- that the principal edition of the play is entitled "Under the Management of Charles Dickens." Although its original audience, as staged in Dickens's home Tavistock House, was modest, the grew in influenec through a series of outside performaces, including one before Queen Victoria at the Royal Gallery of Illustration, and a two-week run at the Manchester Trade Union Hall to benefit the widow of Dickens's old friend Douglas Jerrold. There, night after night, the play moved everyone -- including, by some accounts, the carpenters and the stage-hands -- to tears. It also brought Dickens together the Ellen Ternan, the woman for whom he would leave his wife Catherine.

The play was loosely inspired by the loss of Sir John Franklin's lost Arctic expedition of 1845, in which Dickens had taken a great interest. Specifically, in the fall of 1854, when the Hudson's Bay Company factor Dr. John Rae (explorer) brought back reports of cannibalism among Franklin's men, Dickens was so perturbed that he launched a debate with Rae in the pages of his own periodical, Household Words.